In 2016, Amazon Will Decide to Be the Anti-Alphabet

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In 2016, Amazon Will Decide to Be the Anti-Alphabet

Like Alphabet, Amazon has grown into a company with a lot of businesses. Some of them are very big. Earlier this year, Amazon started disclosing growth figures for Amazon Web Services. AWS is a cloud platform from which startups as well as larger companies like Netflix and Expedia rent their computing power. In the first half of 2015, revenue from AWS jumped 65 percent and accounted for 7 percent of Amazon’s overall revenue—and 37 percent of its profits.

Though they share some infrastructure, AWS and Amazon’s e-commerce and hardware businesses are very different. But AWS chief Andy Jassy has been clear his boss, founder Jeff Bezos, doesn’t plan to spin AWS out. AWS provides the back-end computing infrastructure that powers Amazon’s Kindles as well as Prime streaming videos, and it will be necessary as Amazon prepares for a future of drones and Echo-like devices. In a 2013 press conference, the company said AWS may well be Amazon's largest business one day. It could one day become the growth engine that powers everything else. Until it gets there, Amazon won't go the way of Alphabet; it will go head-to-head against Google's empire, multi-headed conglomerate versus a monolith.